Viva Lewes Issue #132 September 2017

COLUMN
East of Earwig
Read-only memory
Photo by Chrissy Bridge
My wife's flicking through photos of Rupert
the cat on her phone. One shows him almost
seventeen years ago, a tiny saucer-eyed creature
with exactly the same symmetrical black-andwhite
markings as the adult cat I came to know.
"I miss my little kitten", she says. I miss him too,
although he was never my little kitten. Instead, he
chose to adopt me in middle age. (His, obviously.
I'm still in denial about mine.) Sadly, Rupert's
not been himself for several weeks, which is why
we're consoling ourselves by looking through old
photos. At the moment he's sitting on the bedroom
windowsill, although we only know it's him
because his name's written on the label attached
to a little wicker wallet. The preceding words on
the label are 'In Loving Memory Of'.
Rupert had been forgetting things for a few
months. He'd forgotten where his outdoor toilet
was. Then he forgot to eat. Eventually he forgot
to keep breathing, too. One Friday morning, we
woke up but he didn't. We found him lying in his
bed with his offside front leg stretched forwards,
looking about as relaxed as he ever did. Frozen in
the perfect taxidermy of death.
We couldn't bury him under his favourite tree
because we were moving house and didn't want
to leave him behind. So we had him cremated
at Raystede's Peaceways crematorium, where we
bid a sad farewell to him in his feline form and
retrieved him a few days later in a disconcertingly
gritty pocket-sized packet. And we wept, not
just for the cat we'd lost but also for the love we
weren't able to give him any more, for the extra
love he'd never know.
Of course, he's haunting our new home. Bad
ghosts haunt with a malevolent presence. They
put white sheets over their heads and say "woo".
A cat poltergeist might yowl mysteriously from
the wardrobe at midnight or nibble their initials
into an unwary mouse. Rupert haunts us with his
absence. We know the shadow by the window
isn't his. There's a cat-sized gap on the sofa
between me and Mrs B. The buttery crumpet
crumbs remain on our breakfast plates.
We'd expected to lose something when we moved.
A picture frame was dropped. A self-assembly
cupboard started disassembling itself. We spent
a week with only a single cereal bowl between us
before the rest of the mismatched set emerged.
But we'd not expected to leave some of our happy
memories behind.
Fortunately, plenty remain. We have hundreds of
Rupert photos, all copied to secure online storage
in some Californian bunker. Most importantly, we
still have Harry, the backup cat. He's very fond of
his new home... and of sitting in the extra space
that's now available on the sofa. It almost looks
like he's posing for a portrait. Mark Bridge
31